20 Do’s and Don’ts of Effective Web Typography

In a previous article here on Web Design Ledger, I broke down 20 do’s and don’ts of effective web design and today I would like to keep up with that topic and go over 20 do’s and don’ts of effective web typography. It’s an important part of designing for the web, yet it’s often overlooked (even by me previously). Below are the 20 do’s and don’ts and in the comments section, you’re free to let us know of any of the items we might have missed. (more…)

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deCasa: A Premium WordPress Theme for Real Estate

Today we’re releasing another amazing premium WordPress theme from ThemeShift to our premium members. deCasa is a light and elegant real estate theme. A lot of handy features like a search panel, multi-agent support and a professional property exposée let you easily setup your real estate website. (more…)

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The Best Free Icon Sets of 2009

In 2009 we’ve witnessed many talented and generous designers creating tons of amazing stuff and giving it away for us to use. We’ve already shown you all of the best free fonts from this past year. Now we’re going to show you the best free icon sets. There were plenty of free sets created this year, but these stand above the rest in terms of quality and usefulness. (more…)

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10 Tips for Writing Better CSS

Writing your first piece of css code can seem really weird if you’re used to working with tables, or just haven’t written code before. In this article I want to talk about 10 different ways you can write proper and clean css code as well as streamline the process and ensure you’re getting the job done as quickly and efficiently as possible. (more…)

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The Design Evolution of Popular Websites

It seems like only yesterday I was designing my first website. The year was 1997 and apparently I had an affinity to blue lightning bolts and animated gifs of my initials. When the project was complete, I had created the most beautiful design I’d ever seen. At least that’s what I believed at the time. Looking back at that design now is quite embarrassing. I’m sure most of us have been there, but what about popular websites today? Do you ever wonder how they looked in the early days?

In this article, we’re going to travel back in time and see how some of the most popular websites today looked in their beginning, and how their design has evolved through the years. (more…)

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10 Useful Text Enhancing Plugins for WordPress

Out of the box, WordPress is an amazing product and comes loaded with tons of features. However, one area that might be lacking is text formatting. There’s not really any tools built in to do things like dynamic image replacement, code highlighting, and other styling to improve the look of your text. Luckily there is a community of talented developers that have created plugins to fill this need. I’ve listed here 10 of the most useful text enhancing WordPress plugins. (more…)

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The Best Free Fonts of 2009

As this year comes to a close, we can look back and see that 2009 was a big year for typography. We saw more web designs with a focus on type, and there were some pretty amazing fonts released. Here are some of the best free fonts from this past year. A few of the fonts below were released at the end of 2008, but since they didn’t see much action until this year, I included them in the list. (more…)

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Ten Tips for Becoming a Better WordPress Developer

It’s no secret that here at Web Design Ledger, we love WordPress. It’s what powers this website as well as inspires the content we publish on a regular basis. We’ve discussed WordPress numerous times before on the site and today we’re going to cover some of the things you can do to become a better WordPress developer.

I am going to cover a little bit from across the board as to what we can do to become WordPress developers. Some items take only a minute or two to complete while others might take a bit more initial effort. I promise though that through it all, we’ll get our development skills to a much higher level. The list does not go in order of importance, but I would say that all 10 of the tips could each be #1. (more…)

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WDL Premium: Light Grunge Textures

Sometimes you just need to add a hint of grunge to your designs, rather than a big dirty mess and that’s where these subtle grunge textures come in. I created them in Photoshop by combining several different textures in separate layers to get the final effect that you see. I hope you guys can find some awesome uses for the textures, I had a blast making them. Enjoy! (more…)

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Web Design Trends for 2010

With a new year on the horizon, it’s time to pack away the old, worn web designs and prepare for the brave, new face of tomorrow. Although trends don’t start and stop on January 1st, there is a definite shift from what we craved at the beginning of the year to what we are seeking tutorials for at the end of the year. Most of the time, this shift is subtle. It’s a perfection or re-interpretation of a currently hot trend. Trends help us evolve as designers. As we master the skills of design aesthetic, we continue to push forward to what’s next or what needs to be fully discovered. (more…)

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